Just about a year ago, shortly after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine that has since bedeviled the globe, protests erupted in cities all over Russia. It was no surprise to learn that not everyone in that huge and troubled nation was on board with Putin's war — or was fooled by his mystifying rhetoric about "denazifying" and "demilitarizing" Ukraine — especially not among the younger, better educated and more Europeanized populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Still, Russian authorities were clearly not expecting the scale and energy of those demonstrations, and it took them a couple of weeks to get the public disorder under control.
Arguably, that was an early sign that nothing about this war would go according to plan. Of course the protest movement was ultimately crushed with brute force, in the great Russian tradition that stretches back for many centuries. Something like 20,000 people were arrested, quite possibly more. There is obviously continuing discord within Russian society — both about the invasion itself and about its notable lack of success — and some reports (possibly inflated by Western media) suggest that significant numbers of affluent and middle-class people have left the country. But nothing like those early large-scale public protests has recurred.
